The Gospel according to John

D. A. Carson

• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Year: 1990
• ISBN:
  9781467438230
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Commentary

In this solid evangelical commentary on John's Gospel, a respected Scripture expositor makes clear the flow of the text, engages a small but representative part of the massive secondary literature on John, shows how the Fourth Gospel contributes to biblical and systematic theology, and offers a consistent exposition of John as an evangelistic Gospel. The comprehensive introduction treats such matters as the authenticity, authorship, purpose, and structure of the Gospel.

COMMENTARY

I. THE PROLOGUE (1:1–18)

The Prologue is a foyer to the rest of the Fourth Gospel (as John’s Gospel is often called), simultaneously drawing the reader in and introducing the major themes. The following parallels between the Prologue and the rest of the book immediately stand out,¹ although as we shall see there are many others of a more subtle nature:

	Prologue	Gospel
the pre-existence of the Logos or Son	1:1–2	17:5
in him was life	1:4	5:26
life is light	1:4	8:12
light rejected by darkness	1:5	3:19
yet not quenched by it	1:5	12:35
light coming into the world	1:9	3:19; 12:46
Christ not received by his own	1:11	4:44
being born to God and not of flesh	1:13	3:6; 8:41–42
seeing his glory	1:14	12:41
the ‘one and only’ Son	1:14, 18	3:16
truth in Jesus Christ	1:17	14:6
no-one has seen God, except the one who comes from God’s side	1:18	6:46

Not only so, but many of the central, thematic words of this Gospel are first introduced in these verses: life, light (1:4), witness (1:7), true (in the sense of ‘genuine’ or ‘ultimate’, 1:9), world (1:10), glory, truth (1:14). But supremely, the Prologue summarizes how the ‘Word’ which was with God in the very beginning came into the sphere of time, history, tangibility²—in other words, how the Son of God was sent into the world to become the Jesus of history, so that the glory and grace of God might be uniquely and perfectly disclosed. The rest of the book is nothing other than an expansion of this theme.

The tightness of the connections between the Prologue and the Gospel render unlikely the view that the Prologue was composed by someone other than the Evangelist. Suggestions that the Prologue, though written by the Evangelist, was composed later than the rest of the book (as the introduction of this commentary was written last!) are realistic, but speculative.

Many suggestions have been made that the Prologue was originally a poem from some other religious tradition (perhaps gnostic¹, though there is no shortage of theories) that John took over and adapted for his own ends. Every writer uses sources in some sense, but the strong form of this hypothesis goes so far as to try to strip away John’s alleged accretions in the hope of exposing the ‘original’. The more specific the suggestions as to the shape and content of this ‘original’, the more speculative the arguments seem to be, with the result that few adopt so strong a form of the theory today. If John has used sources in the Prologue we cannot isolate them, for they have been so thoroughly re-worked and woven into a fabric of fresh design that there are no unambiguous seams.

The term ‘poem’ can be applied to the Prologue only with hesitation. Many have argued that the Prologue is poetry interrupted by two prose insertions (1:6–8, 15). The great diversity of the suggestions about how the ‘poem’ hangs together (cf. Brown, 1. 22) confirms what classical scholars are quick to point out on other grounds: these verses do not reflect the structure and rhythm of Greek poetry. Some therefore propose that the poetical features of the Prologue be explained by appealing to the poetic characteristics of Hebrew or Aramaic, on the assumption that the Prologue is a Greek translation of an underlying semitic work. But the characteristics in question—parallelism of various kinds, short clauses, frequent chiasms and the like—are found throughout the prose text of the entire Gospel. The most that can be concluded is that the frequency of such features in 1:1–18 enables us to speak of ‘rhythmical prose’.

In particular, especially in the first half of the Prologue (1:1–12a) there is a set of linking words that lend deliberate pacing and dignity to the text. For example (using English words but the word order of the Greek text), we find in vv. 1–2, ‘In the beginning … Word … Word … God … God … Word … in the beginning … God’; in v. 3, ‘were made … were made’; in vv. 4–5, ‘life … life … light … light … darkness … darkness’; in vv. 7–9, ‘as a witness [testimony] … to testify concerning that light … not the light … as a witness [testimony] to the light … The true light that gives light’; in vv. 10–12, ‘the world … the world … the world … that which was his own … his own … did not receive him … received him’. From v. 12b on there are few such links, and the rise in pace adds forward movement as the text with increasing explicitness drives deeper into the realm of history.

The structure of the Prologue is also disputed. Of the large number of proposals advanced by various writers, one of the most believable (though still not entirely free of difficulty) is the large chiasm put forward by Culpepper.¹ If one begins with both ends of the Prologue and works toward the middle, then at certain levels 1:1–2 parallels 1:18, 1:3 parallels 1:17, 1:4–5 parallels 1:16, 1:6–8 parallels 1:15, 1:9–10 parallels 1:14, 1:11 parallels 1:13, 1:12a parallels 1:12c, making 1:12b (‘he gave them the right to become children of God’) the ‘pivot’ on which the chiasm turns, the centre of attention. If the Prologue focuses on God’s self-disclosure in the Word who becomes flesh (1:14) and thereby reveals glory and makes God known (1:18), it also introduces us to the result of this gracious revelation: certain people and not others become children of God. The rest of the Gospel is much concerned to spell out who the real children of God are, who truly are the children of Abraham, which people receive the Spirit and are born again.

Whether or not John intended his readers to find a chiasm in his Prologue, he clearly expected them to detect a certain progression in his line of thought. This in turn suggests that the two references to John the Baptist (1:6–8, 15) are not accidentally placed or somewhat repetitious. In 1:1–5, John traces his account of Jesus farther back than the beginning of the ministry, farther back than the virgin birth, farther back even than the creation. The account must reach back to the eternal, divine Word, God’s agent in creation and the fount of life and light. Having established that absolute starting-point, the Evangelist then turns to the starting-point common to all early Christian tradition: the ministry of John the Baptist (1:6–8), whose transitoriness and function as a witness qualify him to be cast as a foil for the true light coming into the world. It is the coming of this light, and the reactions to him, that are then stressed (1:9–13). Although he was almost universally rejected, some people, born of God, did receive the right to become children of God. The coming of the light, of the Word, that made this possible was nothing less than incarnation, the ‘in-fleshing’ of the Word so that his grace and truth could be seen by human beings in a human being (1:14). Appropriately, it is at this point that the witness of John the Baptist is again introduced (1:15), and rises to the level of historical particularity. Precisely because the Evangelist’s readers are familiar with the Old Testament, he concludes by briefly articulating the relationship between Jesus Christ and the revelation that has already been given, especially in the covenant mediated through Moses (1:16–18).

1. In the beginning immediately reminds any reader of the Old Testament of the opening verse of the Bible: ‘In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.’ Genesis begins with creation; John refers to creation (vv. 3–4), but soon turns to what Paul calls ‘new creation’ (Jn. 3; cf. 2 Cor. 5:17). Both in Genesis and here, the context shows that the beginning is absolute: the beginning of all things, the beginning of the universe. The Greek word behind ‘beginning’, archē, often bears the meaning ‘origin’ (cf. BAGD), and there may be echoes of that here, for the Word who already was ‘in the beginning’ is soon shown to be God’s agent of creation (vv. 3–4), what we might call the ‘originator’ of all things. Granted that the Word enjoyed this role, it was inevitable that at the origin of everything he already was. Since Mark begins his Gospel with the same word, ‘The beginning of the gospel about Jesus Christ’, it is also possible that John is making an allusion to his colleague’s work, saying in effect, ‘Mark has told you about the beginning of Jesus’ public ministry; I want to show you that the starting point of the gospel can be traced farther back than that, before the beginning of the entire universe.’

Although the meanings of ēn (‘was’) and egeneto (rendered ‘were made’ in v. 3, ‘came’ in v. 6 and ‘became’ in v. 14) often overlap, John repeatedly uses the two verbs side by side to establish something of a contrast. For example, in 8:58 Jesus insists, ‘[Before] Abraham was born [a form of the second verb], I am [a form of the first verb].’ In other words, when John uses the two verbs in the same context, ēn frequently signals existence, whereas egeneto signals ‘coming into being’ or ‘coming into use’. In the beginning, the Word was already in existence.¹ Stretch our imagination backward as we will, we can find no point in time where we may agree with Arius, who, speaking of the Word, said, ‘There was once when he was not.’²

But what is meant by ‘Word’? The underlying term, logos, was used so widely and in such different contexts in first-century Greek (cf. LSJ) that many suggestions as to what it might mean here have been put forward.³ The Stoics understood logos to be the rational principle by which everything exists, and which is of the essence of the rational human soul. As far as they were concerned, there is no other god than logos, and all that exists has sprung from seminal logoi, seeds of this logos. Others have suggested a background in Gnosticism, a widespread, ill-defined movement in the Mediterranean world of the first three centuries; but it must be admitted that, so far as our sources go, there is little evidence for the existence of full-blown Gnosticism before John wrote his Gospel (cf. the Introduction, §§ II–III). Still others think John has borrowed from Philo, a first-century Jew who was much influenced by Plato and his successors. Philo makes a distinction between the ideal world, which he calls ‘the logos of God’, and the real or phenomenal world which is but its copy. In particular, logos for Philo can refer to the ideal man, the primal man, from which all empirical human beings derive. But Philo’s logos has no distinct personality, and does not itself become incarnate. John’s logos doctrine, by contrast, is not tied to such dualism. More generally, logos can refer to inner thought, hence ‘reason’, even ‘science’. That is one reason why some have advocated ‘Reason’ as a translation of logos (e.g. Clark). Alternatively, logos can refer to outward expression, hence ‘speech’ or ‘message’, which is why ‘Word’ is still thought by many to be the most appropriate term, provided it does not narrowly refer to a mere linguistic sign but is understood to mean something like ‘message’ (as in 1 Cor. 1:18).

However the Greek term is understood, there is a more readily available background than that provided by Philo or the Greek philosophical schools. Considering how frequently John quotes or alludes to the Old Testament, that is the place to begin. There, ‘the word’ (Heb. dāḇār) of God is connected with God’s powerful activity in creation (cf. Gn. 1:3ff.; Ps. 33:6), revelation (Je. 1:4; Is. 9:8; Ezk. 33:7; Am. 3:1, 8) and deliverance (Ps. 107:20; Is. 55:1). If the LORD is said to speak to the prophet Isaiah (e.g. Is. 7:3), elsewhere we read that ‘the word of the LORD came to Isaiah’ (Is. 38:4; cf. Je. 1:4; Ezk. 1:6). It was by ‘the word of the LORD’ that the heavens were made (Ps. 33:6): in Gn. 1:3, 6, 9, etc. God simply speaks, and his powerful word creates. That same word effects deliverance and judgment (Is. 55:11; cf. Ps. 29:3ff.). When some of his people faced illness that brought them to the brink of death, God ‘sent forth his word and healed them; he rescued them from the grave’ (Ps. 107:20). This personification of the ‘word’ becomes even more colourful in Jewish writing composed after the Old Testament (e.g. Wisdom 18:14, 15). Whether this heritage was mediated to John by the Greek version of the Old Testament that many early Christians used, or even by an Aramaic paraphrase (called a ‘Targum’), the ultimate fountain for this choice of language cannot be in serious doubt.

There are other components in the Old Testament background to the term logos. The ‘Wisdom’ of God is highly personified in some passages (especially Pr. 8:22ff.), becoming the agent of creation and a wonderful gift. This personification is again extended in later Jewish writings (e.g. Wisdom 7:22–8:1; Ecclus. 24). Many scholars, finding frequent parallels to John in Wisdom literature¹, hold that the Evangelist assigns to logos some of the attributes of Wisdom. Something similar could be argued for the place of Torah (roughly, the law or teaching of God) in rabbinic thought; and again, the Word whom John is announcing picks up such themes and in certain respects transcends them (see below on vv. 16–18). There is much to be said for both views. However, the lack of Wisdom terminology in John’s Gospel suggests that the parallels between Wisdom and John’s Logos may stem less from direct dependence than from common dependence on Old Testament uses of ‘word’ and Torah, from which both have borrowed.

In short, God’s ‘Word’ in the Old Testament is his powerful self-expression in creation, revelation and salvation, and the personification of that ‘Word’ makes it suitable for John to apply it as a title to God’s ultimate self-disclosure, the person of his own Son. But if the expressio...